Mizrachi: 'I won $100K bet, but guy went bankrupt'

Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi has won $14 million in poker tournaments, but a recent loss of a very large side bet has him ticked off.

Mizrachi, of North Miami Beach, says a Georgia man, Giorgio Medici, owes him $100,000 from a bet they made just before the World Series of Poker, a series of 61 events in Las Vegas that ran from May 27 to July 7.

Poker players commonly make all kinds of side bets, called proposition, or “prop” bets. Because they are illegal, gamblers don’t put them in writing. But they almost always honor them, unless they never want action again and can handle being excoriated on Twitter and Facebook. To not pay up violates the poker code.

While both were in Las Vegas on May 24, Medici offered Mizrachi 5-to-1 odds against the Grinder’s winning any event in the World Series, Mizrachi says. He took the bet for $20,000 – meaning he stood to win $100,000. Mizrachi says he and Medici exchanged more than a dozen texts, which included tournament updates and Medici’s request for an address to send payment.

“He seemed like a really nice guy,” Mizrachi said.

But after Mizrachi won the Poker Players Championship on June 28, Medici said he couldn’t pay him because he had filed for bankruptcy. Georgia court records show Medici filed for Chapter 7 on July 6.

Both Medici and his lawyer, Peter Bricks of Atlanta, declined comment. World Series of Poker spokesman Seth Palansky notes that the World Series doesn’t endorse side bets.

“We don’t recognize or facilitate anything in regards to these matters. We only facilitate licensed and regulated gaming,” Palansky said.

Medici claims his liabilities are $36.2 million, mostly in real estate. On page 25 of his 62-page bankruptcy filing, he lists his debt to Mizrachi under “unsecured nonpriority claims.”

While getting stiffed on a prop bet is rare in poker – a tight society in which reputation is important – what’s worse for Mizrachi is that he sold $9,500 in shares of his bet to his friends, which is common in poker.

“So I was on the hook for $47,500,” he said. “Of course, I paid them.”

Mizrachi is not asking for sympathy. He said he realizes claiming such a bet from an unwilling payer in any case can be problematic. But he has scorched Medici on social media, with Facebook posts quoting Medici’s texts with the warning “I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”

Mizrachi, who started as a poker dealer at Seminole Casino Hollywood Classic, also notes that the whole situation is ironic for him, considering the U.S. government filed tax liens against him in 2010 for $339,711. Records show the liens were removed about two years ago.